Personal Bytes

Very briefly to avoid annoying any web surfer extraordinaire that may have been subject to extreme dosage of post-Macworld 2008 news:

• TimeCapsule is amazing. Again, they simplify what could be made before with a, say, Linksys NAS, but without the WiFi capabilities and the magic of having to do nothing to have your backups done. Since there are plenty of Mac users around I’ll probably buy one, whenever they update to Leopard
• The iPhone and iPod touch updates are meaningless. We’re all excited to hear that it now features a GPS, it’s decoupled from a exorbitant contract and comes unlocked. But we haven’t. Yet.
• Renting a movie on iTunes for $2.99-$3.99 is obscene when there’s Netflix around. I might understand that it may have an impact on a country like Portugal, where you can only rent a movie through BlockBuster and it costs the same amount. But with Netflix, that plan is doomed. Nothing beats a 3 DVDs-a-time and unlimited hours of streaming for $16.99/month. Period.
• The new Macbook Air is just gorgeous. But it’s too expensive. It fits my requirements. I don’t need neither a CD/DVD player/recorder on the laptop nor a big hard drive. I have plenty of space on my home server and desktop computer so I don’t need to keep anything on the laptop at all.

And that’s it. It seems that this time there was no magic behind AAPL, as the shares dropped about 7% at the absence of better news and as a result of the upcoming American recession.